How is your self-love today, dear reader? Have you treated yourself with kindness and regard? Have you nourished the unique flame of your own life? Have you fed your body and thickened your spirit? Have you allowed yourself to feel how humanly lovable you are, just as you are right now?
If you have, well done. We know how much this goes against the grain. Love fights the deeply etched grooves of habit, our ancient training to treat ourselves with disregard. Every act of self-care is a true and lasting victory for all women.
If you have not managed to actively give love to the woman you are, today, that’s ok too. We can always begin again.
We here at Villa Kali Ma know how compelling shame can be, how strangely difficult it is just to love ourselves even a tiny bit. Self-dislike is the hardest habit to break. It is linked to the heaviest burdens women carry. The burdens of trauma, addiction, and mental illness are all connected to the absence of self-love and lack of self-care.
Yet here we are. January is a month of new beginnings. Serendipitously, January is designated “Self Love Month”. This January, we over here at Villa Kali Ma lend our support to Self Love, by way of this blog post in its honor.
What is Self-Love Month?
Self Love Month is a national awareness campaign, a celebration designed to keep our minds on the topic of caring for ourselves.
Why do we at Villa Kali Ma care about self-love? You can say that self-love gives rise to self-care, which is an important tool in all healing.
Through self-loving actions, we can walk our way into experiencing true love. We wouldn’t ask our loved ones to “just know” that we love them if we never behaved in loving ways, would we? We must behave towards ourselves in loving ways, through acts of care, and then love will find a home within us.
We women need self-love and self-care, both.
What is the history of Self Love?
The modern concept of self-love as a conscious choice started in counterculture. Following the appalling revelations of World War I and II, people began to question the way we live, and whether or not we really have to comply with what our rulers want from us, given how little regard they seem to have for our lives.
Beginning in the 1950s, small but important subcultures, such as the Beatniks, began to loudly question and push back against social authorities. Once unassailable organizations of church, state, money, education, and culture were examined with more scrutiny. People began to notice all the ways we are taught to treat ourselves with a lack of respect and love.
In the mid to late 1960s, the hippie generation and civil rights movement added to the growing wave of opposition to violence against humanity, waged inside and outside of the United States. People began to object to violence against our own population and against foreign nations.
Into the 1970s, different minority communities more openly questioned standards of beauty, lovability, masculinity, and femininity.
In the personal terrain of self, ruled by psychology, spirituality, and philosophy, significant changes took place as well. In every aspect of our life, from the outermost political expressions to our innermost privacies of thought, a new idea was taking place, which is the deepest revolution any of us could ever imagine: that perhaps we can “rule” ourselves. Not as tyrants who hate all that is truly human, but with love, kindness, and respect for human life.
Self Love Month timeline
A few centuries back, before the Renaissance, Western culture did not have an idea of self-love, because there was no strong sense of an individual self at all.
We were more collective in our identity and did not yet have a theory of a personal right, let alone responsibility, to live out the story of our own life. We were more tribal, communal, and familial.
Through sweeping changes brought about by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, the notion of personhood gained a foothold. Philosophy (and eventually the newborn field of psychology) began to gradually explore the idea that each individual life has meaning and dignity of its own. These paradigm changes were connected to geopolitical shifts, like the end of the slave trade and the dismantling of colonialism.
The term “Self Love” entered American thought around the 1960s, when people who were working with trauma victims needed help handling secondary trauma. It was discovered that first responders are more resilient if they actively care for their own needs.
Fast forwarding to the year 2024, self-love has, in our opinion, gotten wildly confused with indulgence, narcissism, and materialism. In this sense, we may have gotten a bit off track, as though it is self-loving to go shopping or to spend a lot of time doing our make-up. (It might be, but it also might not be).
No. Self-love has very little to do with glamor (though we admit comfort can be a part of love). Self-love is a deep embrace of all that is genuinely human. Our sorrow, our ordinariness, our imperfect skin, our follies, and our inner flame, our true shine, are all to be loved.
We may have gotten a bit off the path, but the revolutionary root of self-love is here, and can’t be fully removed. It is a thorn in the side of all who, for whatever their reasons are, hate humanity and can’t stand the idea of us loving ourselves as we are.
Self Love FAQs
How can I give love to myself? Don’t I need another person to love me?
It’s natural to want to love and be loved by others. We can have that too. However, we also can and should learn how to love ourselves, that’s necessary too. How to do that?
Start with thinking about your love language. How do you show your love to other people in your life? And how do you like other people to show their love to you?
Everyone has a slightly different way of showing love, but if we really want people to know that we love them, we have many ways to get the message to them. Once you know your love language, start using it on yourself. You can use the other love languages too, but the ones that really mean something to you will have the most impact.
Think about whether you could set up a self-care routine with many opportunities to use your love language on yourself. A self-love schedule, that will ensure you take loving actions regularly.
How can I tell if I love myself or not?
If you love yourself, you will feel that you are loved and lovable, no matter what. There will be no questions of undeserving, nor on the other hand of inflation or entitlement. Self-love doesn’t mean thinking we’re better than others, that we deserve more, or that others owe us their energy, attention, and love.
Nor does it mean that we are less than, that there is something that makes us inferior or unimportant – that’s not true either!
The challenging truth is full and true equality – all human beings are equally deserving of love, we all partake of love, or have a right to, anyway.
Self-love does mean that we let ourselves receive our own love, first. We make sure that we are filled to the brim with the vibrations of love, knowing that when we are well-fed with love, we will naturally share it with others too. We ideally do not love another person more than we love ourselves.
How can I tell if I am missing self-love?
For those of us with addiction histories, we needn’t even ask this question. Addiction is perhaps the fiercest form of self-hatred. It’s not our fault – we didn’t mean to end up like this, but we did abandon ourselves to forces that mean us no good. We treated ourselves with great, great disregard. If you have a history of addiction, you have a self-love issue.
Even after we enter recovery, and even if addiction never was part of our story, we may have a pattern of codependency, in which we subtly or obviously feel that pretty much everyone else is more deserving of our love and care, than we are.
If we feel guilt, shame, negativity, victimhood, and sabotage ourselves from receiving basic recognition and love, we need to work on loving ourselves. If this is you, don’t feel bad. It is tragically common among us women!
For more about learning to love ourselves, check out this post from Villa Kali Ma.
What are Self Love Month activities?
Self-love activities are actions we take that help us feel in our hearts, minds, bodies, and souls that we are genuinely loved, and worthy of our own love. These activities will be different for different people, as meaning is highly personal.
Why not take the month of January to try a nourishing routine of new self-love activities? Draw up a plan made from activities that you know will transmit love to yourself.
Self-love activities may address any and all layers of a woman’s being: physical body, emotions, thoughts, friendships, creativity, romance, vocation – the possibilities are endless.
How could you show your body that you love her? Healthy food? Going to nature spots she likes? Dancing once a day?
How could you show your tender emotional self that you love her? Journalling about your love every morning for a month? Letting yourself read a book that nourishes your inner child? Playing around creatively in a new medium?
Think about all the sides of the human being you are, then think of ways that you could communicate love to that aspect of your being. How could you show love to your working self? To your romantic self? To your friend self?
Give yourself the gift of dreaming up, and then living out, one heavenly month of loving you most of all.
Important facts about Self Love
1. Human beings need love to be healthy physically?
Love boosts immunity, boosts energy, regulates the nervous system, and helps the body thrive. It is a wonderful thing that with practice, we can give ourselves the love we need. As wonderful as it is to give and receive love from and with other human beings, the most powerful generator of love for the unique being we are is right here within us.
2. Children need love to develop normally
People who for whatever reason aren’t fully loved and cared for appropriately in childhood grow up with mental, emotional, and physical deficits. Luckily, we can restart our growth process by applying self-love later on. As the saying goes, it’s never too late to have a happy childhood. It’s also never too late to be loved. You as your adult self can adopt your past child, bringing her forward in time to live in the present with you as a loved, cherished little girl.
3. Self Love is the key to healing trauma, mental health disorders, and addiction
It’s necessary to apply love to the self in order to be able to recover from serious injuries to the psyche, body, and brain. In fact, lack of love has been part of the problem all along.
Deciding to get help and to heal ourselves might be the greatest self-love act of all. And make no mistake, though we call it the inner healing power, observer mind, and even presence, these are nothing if not alternate names for real, true love.
Why we love Self Love Month at Villa Kali Ma?
This is tragic because each and every one of us is needed. Every woman’s life is felt as a missing or present vibration in the world.
Self-love is the real holy grail. A magic potion, an elixir, a cure for pain. It is produced, amazingly enough, right here in the chambers of our own hearts.
Since we have come to know this truth inside and out, we over here at Villa Kali Ma join in this January celebration of Self Love. Let it be applied to heal all the wounds known to womankind.
Villa Kali Ma can help women with Self Love
Villa Kali Ma’s unique treatment program helps women recover from addiction, trauma, and mental illness. We strengthen women’s hearts, minds, bodies, and spirits by teaching them how to love and care for their own life force, to keep the flame of their own being lit. If this is something you need, come join us in the healing halls of recovery. Our circle is growing every day!